Remember when rock was fun?

Then you’ll love Alberta Ballet’s nod to Elton John

Alberta Ballet dancer Yukichi Hattori portrays Bennie, a young man transported into a different universe where he lives out a life based on the music of his hero, Sir Elton John. Here, he’s the Rocket Man. The show is on for a limited run in Toronto.

Love Lies Bleeding

4.0 stars

It’s taken a year and a half, but Toronto fans of one Reginald Kenneth Dwight — perhaps better known these days as Sir Elton John — are finally getting a chance to get up close and very personal with a dance biography inspired by the composer/singer/showman’s life and music.
And in those 18 months, choreographer Jean Grand-Maitre, who created the work for the Alberta Ballet (where he serves as artistic director), has taken the opportunity to tweak, tighten and otherwise polish a work that seemed destined to become an international calling card from its first performance at Calgary’s Jubilee Auditorium.
It’s called Love Lies Bleeding and it opened Tuesday at the Sony Centre, where it is slated to play through Saturday.
There is nothing new in the confluence of celebrity and dance; Grand-Maitre preceded Love Lies Bleeding, with Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and the Drum set to Mitchell’s music and followed it up with Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, set to the music of Sarah McLachlan, while the National Ballet of Canada scored box office gold in ’08 with Christopher Bruce’s Rooster, set to the music of the Rolling Stones.
But what sets LLB apart from the pack is the biographical element, which opens highly stylized windows into John’s life at the same time it revisits a bouquet of hits and some lesser known tunes drawn from the songbook John created with lyricist Bernie Taupin, over his years at the top of the rock ’n’ roll heap.
It starts and ends simply, with a kid on a tricycle, an evocation and an homage to a core of childish innocence that has allowed John in his later years to carve a niche for himself composing music for family musicals like The Lion King.
As for the time in between, that is revisited through the eyes of an Elton Fan (danced by the hyper-athletic Yukichi Hattori) who inadvertently wanders into an alternate universe where he finds himself reliving his favourite rock star’s life.
From the innocent exuberance of Bennie, played out in full baseball rig-out, he goes on to explore the highs and lows of a life of excess — a life that masked but only barely, both overindulgence and sexual crisis as John struggled to come to terms with fame and his personal demons.
Over a song list that includes such classics as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road­, as well as lesser known works like Madman Across the Water and The Bridge, Grande Maitre imposes a contemporary dance vision that, while informed on occasion by classical ballet, owes much to the jazz, tap and hip-hop schools as well.
Similarly he raids the cupboards and closets of contemporary culture, both gay and straight, to create visuals that are delightfully in-your-face and decidedly homosexy, referencing everything from stripper bars to Andy Warhol, A Clockwork Orange and Cirque du Soleil.
There’s an eye-catching and ever-evolving set from Guillaume Lord, videos by Adam Larsen, dramatic lighting by Pierre Lavoie and barely there costumes by Martine Bertrand.
And while it all comes together in an impressively rollicking, crowd-pleasing two-hour package that will delight John’s fans, one can’t help but wish that after 18 months of practice, the corps had achieved a bit more in the way of precision to showcase some of Grand-Maitre’s work.
Or miss the fact that Love Lies Bleeding offers scant opportunity for the troupe’s ballerinas, who are to be forgiven if they are jones-ing for a similar dance-ography inspired by the work of k.d. lang.